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why would my stationary desktop need wifi (mine has it but I ran a cable to it anyways) when there is gigabit available? it's not like my desktop moves all that much, and by the time i unplug all the other cords, how much work is an Ethernet cord?

no no no. it's just MUCH MUCH MUCH easier to code an app to do it over the wifi than to build an app for android(and accompanying app for desktop) that would make it act as a proper bluetooth mouse, bluetooth gamepad and as a bluetooth keyboard.

You can buy a bluetooth dongle about the size of a dime at WalMart for $20 and it will work with any OS. With kubuntu you don't even have to install any software for it to work. Not all desktops have wifi, and a router is a little more expensive.

There is one Android app [google.com] which makes your phone work as a HID over bluetooth, both as mouse and keyboard. However it needs the phone to be rooted in order to work, and I found it to be quite unstable, and severly unpolished.

Yup, I've used similar on my phone (and before that, my Palm device,) to control my HTPC for a decade now.

While it's nice to have something truly built-in on both sides, rather than my current solution, a kb/mouse VNC client on the phone and a VNC server on the HTPC, it's still rather unnecessary to make a big deal.

Yes, but this isn't really that cool. Logitech had an app out for years that does a lot of the features for Mac and Windoes. I think I saw Linux code for Linux. The article makes it sound like new technology.

This is the kind of backward progress that is touted as the all-new cool thing... Sorry iOS/Android you both suck! Dumb feature phones from 2006 had bluetooth tethering, bluetooth file exchange, bluetooth mouse input, audio streaming... ALL WITHOUT carrier intervention, some special rom, jail-breaking or the need to install any special app.

All my recent phones and tables (Nokia, Apple, Samsung) have Bluetooth, WiFi, mobile data. Only one of my computers (a laptop whose LCD died some years ago) had Blutooth on-board.

There's also the very complex way of understanding and negotiating Bluetooth profiles. Each and every feature that is defined over Bluetooth has multiple variations and quirks and can (and do) fail in mysterious ways and are pretty hard to debug. Not to mention that some of them need specific support in the hardware.

OTOH WiFi and IP networks in general just move packets. And they're pretty standard and interoperable.

no, vim. Sure in the old days vi was guaranteed and vim wasn't, especially on the more obscure 'nixes. And yes, maybe using vi instead of vim was more important when 'nix boxes had 8MB of RAM or less and when every speck of HD space mattered. But for modern Linux, you can almost guarantee vim, unless the user actually went to the trouble of uninstalling it.

Yours is quite rare, i could barely get a m-m 1/8 phono cable the other day there. Idiots tried to sell me a cell phone charger cable. "oh, audio...did you mean bluetooth.. " . *sigh* After i drew it out 'oh, we have a bin back there of old stuff'.

R/S was always overpriced but at least they were a last minute option if you needed sometime NOW and the real store was closed.

And don't get me started about them dropping the old radios and such, which were damned good.

Between the 3 stores in my area I can find basically EVERYTHING they sell online with the exception of a damn strobe transformer that they don't seem to carry anymore... ironic considering they sell the strobe tube in the component racks.

The problem with your statement is this retarded notion that your phone is a general purpose computer.

I can attach a keyboard, full monitor & mouse to my android phone & use it to do pretty much whatever the fuck I like. I can run a full-blown-browser, ssh server, apache, transcode videos, anything in the entire debian software stack (via chroot).

So, explain to me, exactly why the fuck my phone is not a general purpose computer? Frankly, I think you'll find the only thing that is retarded around her

I've thought for a while that it might make sense to use an Android phone as a HID for a Raspberry Pi for presentations through a projector. My phone doesn't output to a projector and the bulk of a keyboard is a portability problem for the RPi, but phone and RPi together take up less than half the space of a netbook.

it has implications for using small devices like the one demo'ed without a kbd and mouse. Things like a dynamic picture frame, your own media center console or even a form of kiosk and not need to put a touch interface on it.

Just because it looks like a PC you know and love, it does not mean it can only be that way.

Okay, its not new for Android, its just that this is another one of timothy's 'I live in a box and have no fucking clue what any of the topics on this site are about... and I'm dumber than dirt' approvals.

Using wifi instead of bluetooth?The HID part of the BT stack is already in place in your Linux/Windows/OSX/Whatever system. So, no need for extra software. Maybe a USD 10.- USB dongle.Then you would use the touch screen of your phone as a trackpad. Or, if possible, the rear camera to understand how the phone is being moved on the desk.I would call this a nice Android application, not the pesky one shown in the above article!

Actually this stuff is turning an android device into a keyboard/touchpad FOR ANOTHER ANDROID device... Also, for Linux and Windows. This is the client/server stuff we've seen since ever, it doesn't involve using native support for USB or Bluetooth peripherals, which would be the real achievement. It''s still cool because it works over the internet, but that's about it.

I've been using using BluputDroid [google.com] for a while. It acts as a bluetooth HID device. It's only requirements are that the phone be rooted, and the desktop have a bluetooth adapter and the correct stack installed. It doesn't require a questionable third-party server to be installed and running on your desktop. I've used it on my two HTPCs without issue.
Considering you can get a small bluetooth dongle off of eBay for $5, it's well worth the price of admission.

BluePutDroid [google.com] will do the same thing. It works by turning your android device into a bluetooth Human Inteface Device (HID). So, it will work with pretty much any device that has bluetooth. Don't have bluetooth? I'm sure you can find a cheap bluetooth USB dongle.

I use it for my PS3. It also has mouse control and has a screen for the PS buttons. I can't handle the 'typing' using PS3 gamepads...

I guess I could use it as a keyboard for my laptop which has bluetooth, but i dunno why, they already built one in!